Likelihood to Recommend If I were speaking to a fellow Managed Service Provider, I would likely NOT recommend this product. There are simply too many other tools out there that are better hitting this particular market. And the pain points that we do have with them are especially difficult because of our business model. However in speaking to pretty much anyone else in IT/Disaster Recovery this is an enterprise tool built to handle anything you throw at it. UNC paths and linking backup servers to one another, the flexibility of the tool allows for maximum cost savings if you build it right.
Read full review AppAssure works well for quick access to point in time backups of Windows machines without having to do a complete restore. The virtual standby function is useful as a disaster recovery or high availability solution. Recent upgrades to the product and rebranding to Rapid Recovery look promising. If your Linux machines are mission [critical] make sure your administrators test restores so they can perform them in a timely manner should the need arise.
Read full review Pros It is reliable and once it is up and running you do not need to worry about it. It is flexible; you can use it to backup on-prem or in the cloud. Backup and DR Read full review Continuous backup with deduplication and compression The P to V function of the software is create. To be able to back up physical machines and create a hot spare on a virtual environment was a great selling point. Can back up physical and virtual (ESX or Hyper-V). Read full review Cons Notifications - on the odd occasion something doesn't work, I get way too many email notifications! Explanation of issues - sometimes when there is a problem, the explanation is a bit lacking in the logs as to why Flagging of errors - sometimes minor errors just get a warning flag, and it doesn't really notify you that they are there. Read full review Support for newer operating systems (Windows, Linux, VMware) is slow to be added. Usually takes 3-6 months from the new version being released for it to be supported. There is no way to automate the testing of the virtual standby which a lot of comparable products are able to do. The software has a backup type called "base image" which is essentially taking a full backup after an unexpected shutdown of the server. If your servers crash and they are very large, this may impact your storage requirements significantly. They do now have synthetic full backups which alleviate this issue a bit but they are not perfect either. Read full review Usability It works great in our infrastructure, we have reduced the risk of losing information at a lower TCO compared to other solutions. The implementation process was precise and fast and upgrades have always been smooth. It delivers what it promises.
Read full review Support Rating Pretty good--I haven't actually had to call them much so it's hard to say. The box works well enough and most of my issues have been related to the rest of my network, rather than the appliance itself.
Read full review In the very few instances we've needed support they have been quick, friendly, knowledgeable, and dedicated to servicing our needs. That has only improved since AppAssure was bought out by Quest.
Read full review Implementation Rating Our initial installation really was not optimum. With the help from Dell Profession Services we were able to get our implementation sized correctly and better understand how to get better deduplication results
Read full review Alternatives Considered Arcserve [UDP] has stood the test of time due to its low cost-to-feature value proposition for our company. We have ultimately decided to move to a more MSP-friendly product in N-Able Backup, but Arcserve [UDP] kept us around for years with their reliable and inexpensive product that delivered above and beyond technologically of their competitors throughout all that time.
Read full review I've been using Rapid Recovery for the last 6 years and before that we had used Backup Exec, but it was a different implementation as we were still running backups to LTO3 tapes using the full/incremental backup schemes. So Rapid Recovery (AppAssure at the time) was a big change for us, backing up to disk instead with base images and changes. I would assume Backup Exec can do this as well, but haven't used it since switching.
NovaBACKUP was a lower cost solution that seemed geared towards smaller and simpler configurations
Read full review Return on Investment We have been able to keep our clients' costs low and add advanced features with no additional overhead for us in licensing. It does however cost us a significant amount of additional technician time to review backups each day compared to other products aimed in our vertical. Read full review AppAssure paid for itself in the first year of usage. A user deleted a major file in our SharePoint sub-site, we used the DocRetriever for SharePoint Console and were able to go back to a particular incremental date and retrieved that file. One of our file shares crashed and we were able to put the physical server on a virtual standby which saved us hours of imaging and restoring of data. This allowed employees to efficiently continue their daily work without much downtime. The offsite replication alone has put an ease on the company in case of any disaster. When Hurricane Sandy hit, we didn't have a solution in place which put us on pins and needles to say the least. But with AppAssure we will be able to have some comfort that all of our mission critical data is being offloaded onto our other sites. Read full review ScreenShots